If I was to use shell.py, then one of use would be the alias I created for checking uptime/downtime:


from shell import ex

t = (ex('last -x')
    |   'grep system'
    |   'head -20'
    |   'tac'
    ).stdout()

print(t)

It has many features, pipe is no doubt that has been demonstrated by the example above, the other major features include, taken and modified from README:

  • Asynchronous execution


    >>> from shell import ex
    >>> c = asex('echo hello shell.py')
    >>> # do something else
    ...
    >>> # wait until process exit and read stdout
    >>> c.stdout()
    'hello shell.py\n'

    By default, it’s blocking, the ex.

  • Parallel execution


    >>> from shell import parallel as par
    >>> par.ex_all(['sleep 2', 'sleep 2']) # return in 2s
    >>> # asynchronous parallel execution
    >>> from shell import parallel as par
    >>> # return immediately
    >>> pe = par.asex_all(['sleep 2', 'sleep 2'])
    >>> # do something else
    ...
    >>> pe.wait()

  • Redirection


    >>> from shell import ex
    >>> ex('echo yolo').wr('/tmp/out')
    >>> ex('echo yolo') > '/tmp/out'
    >>> # appending
    >>> ex('echo yolo').ap('/tmp/out')
    >>> ex('echo yolo') >> '/tmp/out'

If you know me, you should already be able to tell that I am not the fan of this type of library. Besides the interestingness, I really can’t see the practical point of such development. Nevertheless, some might actually find usefulness from it somehow. I believe a few people already do, it has 53 stars on GitHub as of writing, plus 2 forks.

Born on 2014-05-01 as Version 0.1.0. It only works for Python 2, although no error is thrown in Python 3 with my simple example, but the output isn’t expected. Strangely, there seem to be special care for Python 3 in the source code, but the results are different, Python 3 gets the byte stream and Python 2 normal string.

shell.py is written by Qingping Hou under the MIT License, currently version 0.5.0 (2014-05-12), for Python 2 and possibly Python 3.